Gilfillan, Mouth of the Frenchman Fork, 2000
… [T]he function of landscape conjuration changes
continually, and the simple Going-out can become a reclamation of the One Day
Only and an affirmation/authentication of latitude/longitude,
a bestowal of
color and protein-level relations.
The poet looking comprises an intellectual sizing, weighing.
And if the writing holds, it can function by its very nature as both a
naming
and a reclaiming, a corrective and a salvaging, within the
occupying
(preoccupying) culture.
Horses in loose gangs, hillsides netted, laced, fretted with
dark pines, the foreground beach-bright sunlit ochre sand, the distance stark
blue-black cloud and shelf shadow. Two shiny white gumbo-ruts of a snaking road
lower left to upper right, would-be day to would-be night . . .
All day — artists and their surroundings:
a mediation and a bartering. And, maybe, even, one of the ultimate human
stakes: “Never mortify your landscape.”
(Sursum corda.)
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